The ragpicker is omnipresent in the immense 19th-century literature that Walter Benjamin calls "panoramic" (physiologies and tableaux de Paris). Baudelaire's poetic activity, from the July Monarchy to the Second Empire, corresponds to the golden age of rag-picking in Paris, between the Industrial Revolution and the development of organic chemistry. Always accompanied by his three emblems - the bollard, the hood and the hook - the ragpicker is a universal recycler, as described by Pierre Larousse. Rags and waste paper are indispensable for the manufacture of new paper and cardboard. Everything is recycled: bones for sugar and matches, glass, nails, dead cats and dogs, hair... In the 1867 Paris-Guide, Edmond Texier plays on the double meaning of "chiffon", both an object of feminine coquetry and a piece of old linen. The rag trade was becoming lucrative enough to make a good living from it, and even a fortune. In 1875, Maxime Du Camp counted 5,952 medal-winning ragpickers in Paris (registered with the Prefecture of Police); they had their "bourse" on rue Mouffetard. All this talk of recycling is summed up by the title of a plate in Leçon de choses illustrées, in the early 1880s: "Nothing dies on earth, everything is transformed." By this time, however, wood pulp was replacing rag pulp in paper manufacture, and household waste collection was organized differently, thanks to the Prefect Poubelle's decrees of 1883-1884. The ragpicker survived only as a picturesque Parisian type.
In the second "Spleen", Baudelaire draws up a familiar list of used objects. Francesco Orlando links the melancholy of this poem to modernity's annihilation of all intimate experience of things; objects lose their function and become relics, as in "Le Cygne" or "Le Flacon". Yet the era left no remains: if the materials in "Spleen" had been dumped in the street, they would have been immediately picked up and resold. It was at this point that the word "occasion" (second-hand) took on a new meaning, to designate a used good that was offered for sale again (the first attestations concern cashmere). In Jules Janin's 1829 novel L'Âne mort et la Femme guillotinée(TheDead Donkey and the Guillotined Woman), the corpse of the executed young woman is stolen the day after burial for the medical school. Baudelaire's melancholy is certainly linked to old-fashioned objects, but it is exacerbated by the fact that they always have a re-use value. A chiffonier is also a piece of furniture with drawers where women keep their memories; it's the furniture of "Spleen". The play on double meanings is widespread, for example in Étienne de Jouy's L'Hermite de la Chaussée d'Antin, which in 1811 describes a fashion originating in England, launched by women who collect their friends' mementos in a "sentimental chiffonnier", modelled on the "album" of the previous century.
